Syndicated columns

Using the most bloodless terms, an economist explained the failure or inability of so many African-Americans to rise from their impoverished circumstances. They do not respond to the economic incentives that push others to study and strive, he said. Penniless peasants from Central America pile into freight trains to secure any job in the land of plenty. Black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa are clearly moving up. So have many African-Americans who’ve left poor city neighborhoods for the suburbs and others who’ve remained.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – A hundred years ago, more than 1,000 women gathered here in The Hague during World War I, demanding peace. Britain denied passports to more than 120 women, forbidding them from making the trip to suppress their peaceful dissent. Now, a century later, in these very violent times, nearly 1,000 women have gathered here again, this time from Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as Europe and North America, saying “No” to wars from Iraq to Afghanistan to Yemen to Syria, not to mention the wars in our streets at home. They were marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of WILPF, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a Dutch suffragist who co-founded the group a century ago, said the purpose of the original gathering in 1915 was to empower women “to protest against war and to suggest steps which may lead to warfare being an impossibility.” Among the women here were four Nobel Peace Prize winners. Shirin Ebadi was awarded the prize in 2003 for advocating for human rights for Iranian women, children and political prisoners. She was the first Muslim woman, and the first Iranian, to receive a Nobel. Nevertheless, she has lived in exile since 2009, and has only seen her husband once since then. “Had books been thrown at people, at the Taliban, instead of bombs, and had schools been built in Afghanistan,” Ebadi said in her keynote address to the WILPF conference this week, “3,000 schools could have been built in memory of the 3,000 people who died on 9/11 – at this time, we wouldn’t have had ISIS. Let’s not forget that the roots of the ISIS rest in the Taliban.” She was joined by her sister laureates: Leymah Gbowee, who helped achieve a negotiated peace during the civil wars in Liberia; Mairead Maguire, who won the peace prize in 1976 at the age of 32 for advancing an end to the conflict in her native Northern Ireland; and Jody Williams, a Vermonter who led the global campaign to ban land mines, and who now is organizing to ban “killer robots,” weapons that kill automatically, without the active participation of a human controller.

The biblical-marriage demonstrators were outnumbered 5-to-1 or more outside the Supreme Court Tuesday morning, but they were not lacking in vitriol or vulgarity. “Homo Sex is Sin,” proclaimed one banner. “Dirty Homo, Stop Sinning,” proclaimed another large banner. A woman holding a sign that said “Fags Are Beasts” led a group of demonstrators in singing a parody of the Sam Smith and Mary J. Blige tune “Stay With Me” called “Fag Marriage, It Can’t Be,” and in a parody of Green Day’s “American Idiot”: “You wanna be an American sodomite/One nation controlled by fag media.”

Maybe congressional Republicans really are nuts, suicidal or both. The latest evidence is House approval of legislation abolishing the estate tax, sometimes called the “death tax.” The chances of this soon becoming law are slim, because even if it passes the Senate, congressional Republicans probably won’t be able to override President Obama’s promised veto. Meanwhile, they’ve handed Democrats a priceless campaign gift: a made-for-TV (and Internet) video depicting Republicans as lackeys of the rich. It’s not as if Republicans aren’t used to being stigmatized as shills for the wealthy. But why (one might ask) would they go out of their way to confirm the stereotype? With economic inequality a major issue, why strive to be portrayed as stooges for hedge-fund operators, well-paid executives, affluent celebrities and wealthy families? All would benefit if the estate tax were repealed.

“Obama is a Muslim,” it said. “That is a FACT.” As best I can recall – my computer ate the email – that was how the key line went in a reader missive that had me doing a double-take recently. It was not the outlandish assertion that struck me but, rather, the emphatic claim of its veracity. We’re talking Shift-Lock and all-caps so there would be no mistaking: “Obama is a Muslim. That is a FACT.”

Lee Correctional Institution, South Carolina’s largest maximum-security prison, gets plenty of bad press – from a riot and a lockdown in February to drone-delivered contraband a few days ago. But within the walls of this all-male complex, something rare and beautiful is also happening.

Volatile events in Olympia are a sign that, though budget talks ended in a stalemate, pent-up revenue demands can’t be held back forever. Tim Eyman pleaded with Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee to “save the day” in the face of a “massive” property tax hike proposed by big, bad Senate Republicans. House Democrats joined Eyman in bashing the proposal, even though wealthy property owners would be the chief losers of the proposed “levy swap.” Democrats prefer a capital gains tax, which would touch only the super rich.

In December, President Obama said that he wished to see Iran ultimately become a “very successful regional power.” His wish – a nightmare for the Western-oriented Arab states – is becoming a reality. Consider: • Gulf of Aden: Iran sends a flotilla of warships and weapons-carrying freighters to reinforce the rebels in Yemen – a noncontiguous, non-Persian, nonthreatening (to Iran) Arabian state – asserting its new status as regional bully and arbiter. The Obama administration sends an aircraft carrier group, apparently to prevent this gross breach of the U.N. weapons embargo on Yemen. Instead, the administration announces that it has no intention of doing anything. Meanwhile, it exerts pressure on Saudi Arabia to halt its air war over Yemen and agree to negotiate a political settlement involving Iran.

There’s been some tense back-and-forth over the Canadian mother who said she had stopped opposing vaccinations after all seven of her kids came down with whooping cough. Some say we should loudly thank Tara Hills for publicly disowning her anti-vax campaign. Others – me, for instance – are feeling less grateful. Hills went beyond spreading lies about the “dangers” of vaccinations and exposing her Ottawa neighbors to serious disease. She strongly implied that the best medical authorities are “puppets of a Big Pharma- Government-Media conspiracy,” according to the Washington Post – and on a site demoniacally named TheScientificParent.org.

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” reads the unofficial motto of the United States Postal Service. We now can add to that “nor a national security no-fly zone,” as demonstrated by mailman Doug Hughes. Hughes was doing what he felt was his duty, carrying letters. He had 535 of them: one for each member of Congress, and each signed by Hughes himself. He wrote about the corrupting influence of money in politics. Hughes chose a very high-profile method for delivering his letters, though. He piloted a bicycle-size helicopter, called a “gyrocopter,” 100 miles from Maryland, and landed on the west lawn of the U.S Capitol, passing through restricted airspace.

Fifty years ago, in mid-April 1965, the trade magazine Electronics published an article by an obscure scientist making a seemingly preposterous prediction: The number of electronic components (transistors, resistors, capacitors) that could be squeezed onto integrated circuits – what we now call computer chips – would double every year for a decade. The author was Gordon Moore, and his forecast, subsequently slightly modified, is now known as Moore’s Law. We have been living with the consequences ever since. Moore’s Law is a quiet rebuke to those who think we control our destiny. The historical reality is that technological, commercial and intellectual upheavals – often unforeseen – set in motion forces that create new opportunities and threats. We struggle to master what we haven’t anticipated and often don’t understand. The explosion of computing power imagined by Moore is one of those spontaneous transformations that define and dominate our era.

Maybe, conservatives are done with dog whistle politics. After all, National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre traded his dog whistle for an air horn at a recent gathering of the gun faithful in Washington, D.C. “I have to tell you,” he said, “eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough.”

Here we go. If you’re a woman who might prefer someone other than Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States, you’re a self-loathing, anti-woman traitor. Already, women I know report that they’re feeling the heat from their more-liberal friends. Not a Democrat for Hillary? Good luck leaning forward, at least in this town. I’ve heard from a few readers along the same lines.

Asking a politician to “put politics aside” is an odd request. Even odder when a politician says it. Would we expect this of other professions? “I’m sure we could reach agreement on my zero-interest-loan request if you’d just put banking aside.”

See Hillary ride in a van! Watch her meet everyday Americans! Witness her ordering a burrito bowl at Chipotle! Which she did wearing shades, as did her chief aide Huma Abedin, yielding security-camera pictures that made them look (to borrow from Karl Rove) like fugitives on the lam, wanted in seven states for a failed foreign policy. There’s something surreal about Hillary Clinton’s Marie Antoinette tour, sampling cake and commoners. But what else can she do? After Barack Obama, she’s the best known political figure in America. She has papal name recognition. Like Napoleon and Cher, she’s universally known by her first name. As former queen consort, senator and secretary of state, she has spent a quarter-century in the national spotlight – more than any modern candidate.

Some time ago, I heard a power company executive arguing that humans have played no role in global warming. Actually, he went further, “demonstrating” that global warming isn’t even happening. (This is often done by cherry-picking dates to start with an unusually warm year.) He ended by spreading his arms and beseeching us in his common-sense voice, “Can’t we meet in the sensible middle?” To which I thought, “If I say the moon is made of lunar rock and you say it is made of green cheese, is the ‘sensible middle’ that the moon is half lunar rock and half green cheese?”

For the first time in more than half a century, the presidents of the United States and Cuba have had a formal meeting. Barack Obama met with Cuban President Raul Castro at the seventh Summit of the Americas, held this year in Panama City. Cuba’s participation has been blocked by the U.S. since the summit began in 1994. This historic moment occurs with some sadness, however: Eduardo Galeano, the great Uruguayan writer who did so much to explain the deeply unequal relations between Latin America and the U.S. and Europe, died as the summit ended. Galeano’s best-known book is “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.” It was published in 1971 and was among the first to explain the impact of colonial domination of the hemisphere, across the broad sweep of history. Galeano himself was swept away by events as well. He wrote the book “in 90 caffeinated nights,” he said, “to interlink histories that have been before told separately and in this codified language of historians or economists or sociologists. I tried to write it in such a way that it could be read and enjoyed by anyone.”

Give credit to Republicans in Congress. They’ve discovered, belatedly, that income inequality is a problem, and they’re no longer proposing to give tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Now they are proposing to give tax breaks to the wealthiest two-tenths of 1 percent of Americans.

On any given day, you can expect news of major corporate mergers. Last week, we had decisions from FedEx to buy the Dutch delivery company TNT for $4.8 billion and from Royal Dutch Shell to acquire the BG Group, a British natural gas company, for $70 billion. Mergers and acquisitions have become a staple of modern capitalism. In 2014, worldwide M&A totaled $3.5 trillion, up 47 percent from the year before, reports Thomson Reuters. There are many motives for mergers: to minimize competition; to reduce costs by eliminating overlapping operations; to acquire a hot product or technology (which can be peddled on existing sales platforms); to enter new geographic markets; or to get bigger. Some M&A deals make sound business sense; others suggest managerial empire-building.